AN INTERVIEW WITH GLENN STOUT, AUTHOR OF
I stumbled across her story nearly a decade ago while working with the late David Halberstam on the collection we did together, The Best Sports Writing of the Century. Although a story about Trudy did not make it into that volume, I was nevertheless intrigued by the brief account I read. Despite the fact that I had previous written a great deal about women’s sports figures and sports history, writing profiles of pioneers like Eleanora Sears and Louise Stokes, and ghostwriting biographies of people like Mia Hamm, the tennis playing Williams sisters, skater Tara Lipinski and others, Trudy’s story had somehow eluded me. Over the next five or six years, as I fulfilled other commitments, I periodically researched her story until I was able to determine there was enough for a book – no one had ever written a biography of her before. You know, when she swam the Channel she was only nineteen years old, the first woman to do so. Only five others – all men – had ever swum the Channel at the time, and Trudy beat the men’s record by nearly two hours! That stunned me, particularly after I learned that fewer people have swum the Channel than have climbed Mount Everest. Even today, swimming the Channel is one of the most difficult athletic feats on the planet.
So I started poking around at the story. Even a cursory look at old newspaper accounts convinced me of its importance, because Trudy and her achievement are enormously important. In the mid 1920s there were virtually no female athletes of note. In fact there was still considerable debate over not only whether women had the right to compete as athletes, but whether they were even physically able to do so. When Trudy swam the Channel two hours faster than a man, she blew that argument right out of the water, forever and for all time. I cannot think of a more important female athlete – not even Babe Didrikson or Billie Jean King is comparable. She’s a terrific role model for any young woman – or for that matter, anyone of any age or gender.
That was a real challenge. All I could do was try to steep myself in research and then combine that with my own life experiences to try to gain access to hers. I knew when I started the book that I somehow needed to give the reader a feel for what it was like for her to spend fourteen and a half hours in the Channel. Fortunately, at about the time I began working on the book I began spending a great deal of time on the water myself. I’m not much of a swimmer but I live on Lake Champlain in Vermont and have kayaked hundreds of miles in all sorts of weather conditions, giving me some sense of what it was like for her to be tossed about the Channel for so long. I’ve also been a runner for thirty years and have some empathy for individual athletic challenges. On the research side I read accounts of other Channel swimmers, scoured old newspaper stories about Trudy, looked at photographs and film footage of her swim and others, spoke with swimmers, and read every interview I could find with her. Eventually, I collected more than 6,000 clippings. All I could do was all I could do, steep myself in research and use my life experience to
In that way I was, in a sense, able to “inhabit” her experience, and I hope, present it with authenticity. I was able to create not only a timetable for the actual swim, so I knew where she was at each moment, but I also created a detailed list of every impression or sensation she ever mentioned that she experienced while she was in the water. As I recreated her crossing I then used press bulletins as checkpoints for her journey. In that way I hoped to recreate not only the facts of her journey, but, as much as possible, the experience itself.
And I think I did. I recently received an unsolicited e-mail from a reviewer, an experienced Channel swimmer. She wrote me, that “You really were able to capture open water swimming and what it is all about.” That’s the best review I could ever ask for.
Oh, my gosh, no, although I think anyone who swims or competes in anything will obviously find her story personally meaningful. But really, I think Young Woman and the Sea is a universal story, one that naturally will be particularly appealing to girls and women, but also to students of history, and readers drawn to stories of inspiration, adventure, and perseverance against the odds. It is also thoroughly modern – swimming the Channel was probably the first “extreme” sport. And the story takes place in the 1920s, which is a particularly rich time period to write about. In many ways Trudy was emblematic of the age, of the transition from the Victorian Era to the Roaring Twenties. She was a girl of her time. She wore her hair in a bob, liked to dance, drive fast, and listen to what she called “hot American jazz.” In fact, while she swam the Channel they played recordings of popular songs on a gramophone aboard the boat to help her fight boredom and keep pace. It was her version of an I-Pod.
As much as any suffragette, Trudy was a true pioneer. When Trudy tried to swim the Channel she was going headlong against the conventions of the day. She had failed in her first attempt to swim the Channel, and near the end of her second, successful attempt, much of which took place in a gale that kept most boats in the Channel in port that day, her trainer tried to convince her to quit. Trudy asked “What for?” and no one had answer to that. She was determined to succeed, no matter what, it was that simple. In that sense her story is inspirational for anyone who has ever been told her or she could not do something – the whole world was telling Trudy she could not swim the Channel, yet this nineteen year old girl believed in herself and swam the Channel anyway. While she was keenly aware that she would become the first woman to swim the Channel, it was also personal to her. She was partially deaf and felt a bit out of place in the world. But in the water she felt completely at home. There, she wasn’t disabled. For her, swimming the Channel was like staking a claim to her own identity, a way to find her true self. She had a spirtual connection to the sea, once saying, “To me, the sea is like a person - like a child that I’ve known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I’m out there.”
That just makes her story even richer. In an instant she became the best known woman in the entire world. Everyone wanted a piece of her and in a sense she became the world’s first celebrity. When she returned to New York she was given the city’s first big ticket tape parade – only Charles Lindbergh’s was bigger. Close to a half million people turned out to see her, and she received offers for endorsements and other commercial opportunities worth nearly a million dollars.
But that wasn’t Trudy. She was shy and rather private. Rather quickly, she was overwhelmed by the attention, exactly what we sometimes see today when someone suddenly becomes a public figure. All too often they lose sense of themselves and crash and burn. But not Trudy. Although she went on to a successful vaudeville tour in which she would demonstrate her swim in a glass tank and speak about her experience, and co-starred in a movie with Bebe Daniels, she withdrew from the limelight rather quickly and within a few years had faded from public memory. For most of the rest of her life she lived quietly, secure in her accomplishment, yet without regrets. She knew what she had done and how important it was.
While her given name was Gertrude, and as she grew older she tended to use her formal name more often, while she was growing up her family and friends all called her “Trudy.” In the book I make use of a letter she wrote her mother after the swim, which she ends by writing “I am only your Trudy.” Since that is what she used at the time, I chose to use it as well.
I think anytime and anywhere you see girls and young woman playing sports, or being physically active, or doing anything that society once thought women could not or should not do, we are seeing the impact of Trudy’s crossing of the Channel, of her courage, her pioneering spirit, and her inspirational example. I dedicated the book to my own daughter and young women everywhere who might one day ask, as Trudy did, “What for?”
Her legacy is all around us.